Philosophy & Ethics

If a doctor believes an antibiotic or sedative is not needed and instead provides a placebo to a patient, is the physician protecting public health or subjectively disregarding the ethics of full disclosure? You decide.

Many rheumatologists and general internal medicine physicians in the US say they regularly prescribe "placebo treatments" including active drugs such as sedatives and antibiotics, but rarely admit they are doing so to their patients, according to a study on BMJ.com today.

Pierre-Simon de Laplace, the 18th century French astronomer who proposed one of the early theories of the formation of the solar system, famously postulated a “Demon” who had enough information to know what would happen in any place in the universe at any time. It was the height of mechanistic and deterministic hubris in science, and it seemed that it was only a matter of time before physicists would find out everything there was to find out about the way the world works

There was a time when being a journalist was a higher calling - and that higher calling was truth. Somewhere in there it became well-known that journalists were a little more liberal than most and that was bad. Well, why wouldn't they be? Journalists, of the old school, graduated high school and took jobs at small newspapers. They covered the late night crime beat, they did obituaries - they saw how in some cases people who didn't have much of a way out did things people with money and food say they would never dream of doing.

In any civilized society, people should not starve. I'd be more suspicious of young journalists who were not liberals in that environment. Who doesn't want to believe we can create a better world?

What do presidential candidate Barack Obama and Snapple Iced Tea have in common? Patricia Turner, professor of African American and African studies at the University of California, Davis, whose research focuses on urban legends and conspiracy theories, notes that Snapple had to grapple with two false rumors when it became a sensation in 1993.

Did you ever hear that Snapple has ties to pro-life extremists or that it was owned by the Ku Klux Klan? We haven't either but apparently that's what some people said and some people believed.

I heard the Finnish diplomat Martti Ahtisaari say today that he had been "eternally displaced" ever since he had become a child refuge in World War II. The recipient of the 2008 Nobel Peace Prize recalled his wartime suffering as the impetus for his lifetime work in peacemaking.

Thank you, Martti Ahtisaari, for being you. Congratulations!

I recall that Deepak Chopra designated seven practices for peace in his book "Peace is the Way".(1)

As a scientist, sometimes you have to take matters into your own hands.
Or into your own arm, and occasionally, your own heart.
Autoexperimentation is the very risky practice of wildcat science. If you can’t find an animal model for a virus, inoculate yourself. If you can’t find a volunteer, step up.
Several autoexperimenting scientists have won the Nobel Prize.
Nobel Hearts
Werner Forssmann won the Nobel in 1956 for performing the first cardiac catheterization.

You may have seen it last week. There were charges of fraud levelled at the Obama campaign because donations from names like 'Doodad Pro' were not reported by his campaign. In the last election, there were claims that Republicans invoked anti-fraud measures to suppress legitimate voting by groups that tend to vote Democratic.

In both cases, there was more hyperbole than substance. There is fraud, but the immediacy of the internet has magnified it into being much more substantial than it is and University at Buffalo Law School Professor James A. Gardner cautions against giving too much importance to charges of voter fraud in American elections and supposed incompetence in administering elections. The process in the overwhelming majority of elections, he says, is working well.

Nachrichten aus Großbritannien

Government spies could scan every call, text and email

Ministers are considering a £12 billion plan to monitor the e-mail, telephone and internet browsing records of every person in Britain.
This is the heading of an article in today's Daily Telegraph. Two questions:
Would it work? (Especially with our government's record of sloppy data handling)
How would one escape over the Firewall?

White people, even children as young as 10, avoid talking about race because any opinion may appear prejudiced, according to new research, but that approach often backfires as blacks tend to view that approach as evidence of prejudice, especially when race is clearly relevant.

These results are from two separate sets of experiments led by researchers from Tufts University and Harvard Business School. Their findings are reported in the October issue of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology(1) and the September issue of Developmental Psychology(2).

“Efforts to talk about race are fraught with the potential for misunderstandings,” said the studies’ lead author, Evan Apfelbaum, a PhD candidate at Tufts University. “One way that whites try to appear unbiased is to avoid talking about race altogether, a tendency we refer to as strategic colorblindness.”